The former Texas GOP Senator testified that AT&T CEO Edward Whitacre was an "exploited worker," whose $75 million golden handshake proved "bigotry that is still allowed in America...bigotry against the successful."

Michael from Muckrock sez, "Turns out death squads aren't the only agencies buying Hacking Squad's controversial spyware. Town from Miami Shores, FL to Eugene, OR appeared on a list of US agencies that received demonstrations from the hacked surveillance vendor. MuckRock has mapped out who was on the lists, and is working to FOIA what these towns actually bought, if anything. Check and see if your city is on the map."

The State of Georgia claims that its statutes are a copyrighted work, and that rogue archivist Carl Malamud and public.resource.org committed an act of piracy by making the laws of Georgia free for all to see and copy.

A 16-year-old boy was prohibited from video-recording his own pat-down at New Orleans airport -- something explicitly allowed by the TSA -- and when he recorded his father's pat-down, the TSA supervisor at his checkpoint called the police on him.

Abel Gonzales Jr was raised by Tex-Mex restaurateurs, and began his career as God of the deep fryer out of necessity, when he was desperate to come up with a dish for the Texas State Fair's Big Tex Choice Award, and all he had was a fryer.

The Washington Post editorial board lost its mind and called on the National Academy of Sciences to examine "the conflict" over whether crypto backdoors can be made safe: the problem is, there's no conflict.

Michael sez, "Sometimes a simple 'no' can be better than what agencies consider a response when it comes to Freedom of Information. J. Pat Brown over at FOIA powerhouse MuckRock discovered that the hard way when, after a request for information on information about the IRS's whisteblower office resulted in documents being sent on a CD ... that was fully encrypted ... using a Windows only app ... where the password was sent along in a separate letter."

UC Berkeley Political Scientist Wendy Brown came to the London School of Economics last week to discuss her book Undoing the Demos, and her lecture (MP3) is literally the best discussion of how and why human rights are being taken away from humans and given to corporations.

Adafruit Industries has been stripped of revenues from its Youtube channel after Rumblefish -- a notorious music-rights agency -- claimed to own the copyright on a public domain, taxpayer-funded rendition of "America the Beautiful."

The force is the largest in America, with a starved and ineffectual Internal Affairs department, which has been powerless to check the Border Patrol's slide into collusion with drug-runners, shootings of protesters, and extreme violence in border areas.